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Having said that, I didn't find anything that reported on the Manafort story before this week. I know it happened on the 26th of July. Were there stories that went out around then?

Do you seriously think that Trump did not find out about it until it was reported in the news? You would have to assume that Manafort or Manafort's lawyers are not in touch with Trump or Trump's lawyers, and you would have to assume that nobody in the Justice Department told anybody in the White House.

Everybody who knew about it that morning assumed it would be promptly leaked to the news. It's amazing that it stayed secret until now.

Do you seriously think that Trump did not find out about it until it was reported in the news? You would have to assume that Manafort or Manafort's lawyers are not in touch with Trump or Trump's lawyers, and you would have to assume that nobody in the Justice Department told anybody in the White House.

Everybody who knew about it that morning assumed it would be promptly leaked to the news. It's amazing that it stayed secret until now.

Honestly? Trump isn't supposed to know about things like this. So I think it's very possible he didn't. Having said that, I agree that a sitting President likely has ways to know about this stuff even when they shouldn't.

But more to the point- typically distracting narratives happen when an administration knows that a story is about to break- not when something has happened. If there were no stories breaking on this at the time of the raid (reputable news outlets will talk to the Administration about these stories before they are printed), then there wasn't any reason to distract.

New cycles are so fast that an administration can't really count on a competing narrative lasting more than a day or two. So it's generally not prudent to create the distraction until right before or right after an undesirable story breaks.

On that same morning Trump used Twitter to call on Jeff Sessions to replace FBI acting director Andrew McCabe.

I hadn't placed those two on the same timeline.

I would agree with you that this seems too good to be true, as far as coincidences go. I've been looking at this from the perspective of controlling a new cycle, but I think you're right to point out Trump was pretty clearly engaging in his typcal "Undermine the people/institutions who can come after me" strategy to pre-empt this story.